Still life

I should go to bed, but bed reminds me of you. So I’ll stay in this cube, with your metal desk and grey leather typist chair: the room you like to call the study. At least there’s company here. Your computer will talk to me; cheeky voices from the forums will flirt.

My crime is love. To spend the whole of this evening alone, my punishment.

Nearly eleven. Much later and I’ll start to worry that something has happened to you. Already I worry that you have happened to somebody. Each minute stretches out like the ball of string that ties you to me. Soon I will run out of string. You said, it’s part of the job. A campaign launch so you must stay for a glass of wine. All terribly boring, having to schmooze the clients. I agreed of course, sweet as ever. Have a good time – behave yourself.

If this is your work, what does that make you?

Did you know it would be like this for me? When you first opened me? When you split me in two and turned my body inside out? You say it’s all just for fun. You want to spread your arms, catch every single thing that life can throw. And I only wanted you. You experience them all, every week, but do you know love? That tacky, semen-smeared word. My love is like my body now, an overblown balloon, inflated too many times. It has lost its elasticity. My love lies cast off on the bathroom floor.

Eleven thirty-two. Another taxi pulls up in the street, gurgles its diesel breath into the winter night. I strain to hear footsteps, the joyful jingle of keys in the lobby door.

Eleven forty-six. I don’t want to talk to the non-people, the desperate Friday night voices on the screen. But I can’t go back to the studio. There are still-wet demons waiting; swathes of black and red seep down their faces. Eight hours I served in there today. Eight hours of wasted labour for you with these stained hands. That leaves the gaping bathroom or nothing. How many baths can a boy take in one day? Out in the streets, you race for success like your sporty little car. Your life is so busy, with its comings and goings. Had to lunch the media guys. Down to Charlotte Street to watch the offline. Go tart.

Eleven forty-nine. I flip open my mobile again, ignite the blank screen for an instant. They are playing Wham! on the radio, to remind me that my life is a cliché. Every day I hear a different story.

And me? Today I smeared my love across an empty canvas. Cadmium red. I squeezed your blood from the tin tube. Smoothed it with my fingers over the creamy fabric. Imagined the canvas was your stomach. It only lacked the hairs, brown and soft as bristles. I tickled the brush along my cock. I tasted the sticky paint, lubricated my finger with it. At first the flavour surprised: it was sweet, buttery, nutty. I spread it over the back of my teeth, my gums, with the tip of my tongue. Then the acid cut through the surface. My mouth filled with the chemical plastic bite of acrylic. What else is there to do when you spend each day alone?

Do you know how cold it is, in that industrial space? The stone floor you wanted, it burns my naked soles with cold. I cannot paint in shoes. The huge iron radiators don’t even have the energy to warm themselves. My hands slide between their vents without scalding. All the heat leaks out through the great slanting sheets of frozen glass.

Twelve o’clock and an empty bed. The pillow still smells of your hair. Stupid to worry. You will come home soon. You always do. You’ll kiss me and hold me. You’ll climb onto me, talking excitedly about your evening, the adventures you had, your lust forced out by champagne. And I will taste the stale sweat of others on your neck, drink the strange saliva from your lips. Breathe it all in again, swallow it down, take it as usual. Hold it all inside.

You keep me in your greenhouse. Like the potted grass tree you tend so lovingly. What can I do to make you water me, to have you stroke my leaves? What can I do to hold it all inside? Go back there?

Twelve fifty-three. Twist again in the winding sheets. The hot fug of my body clouds the room. Stretching my ears out into the night, I can hear the car that turns five streets away. My own breath keeps me awake. The sound of canvases rotting behind the door.

One twenty. Go back to the studio. Kick the easels to the ground. Scatter brushes, squeeze the tubes. Excrete paint over the floor. The palette knife is too blunt for this. Find the craft knife in the old wooden drawer. It is sharp as a scalpel.

Take one more bath.